I have always had a problem with the Popular Magazines (Popular Science and Popular Mechanics). a few years ago, when I was in high school, Popular Science ran a story about how the alignment of the planets was going to result in the earth's magnetic poles reversing and flipping the planet end-over-end. This story caused a 14 year-old pubescent a good bit of pointless stress. 

But that was a long time ago, and I have since gotten over it. My introduction to skepticism ,a Carl Sagan book titled Broca's Brain, cured me of my fantasy-is-reality mindset. that the media and popular press seem to love to exploit. 

A new article in Popular Mechanics OnLine has made the magazines a bit more reliable to skeptics. The article, called A Dummy Response, very competently illustrates the Air Force's explanation as accurate. This explanation is that, in 1947, a top-secret military balloon (loaded with dummies) crashed on the farmer's land and started the whole business that keeps UFO "investigators" in employment. 

The Roswell Incident gives anti-government conspiracy theorists a reason to keep up the good fight against imagined government wrongdoings to the American public. It's an interesting rallying point that puts the Air Force (a legitimate and very-much appreciated, by this author, military division) in a rock-and-hard-place position. They could lie and say that there was a government cover-up of alien invaders, or they could tell the truth and be considered liars. No matter what explanation the Air Force gives for the Roswell Incident, nobody but the Air Force (and certain skeptics...ahem...) will believe them. 

Don't get me wrong, folks. Skepticism does not make one blindly believe anything the government says, and that certainly is not true with me. But since I strongly believe that aliens are well away from our little planet, and since the Air Force is the only group of people who truly know what happened, then the truth must be very secret (and therefore should not be heard by our enemies' ears) and that they continue to lie, or that they are telling the truth. My choice is clear.